Mohamed balances colonial history and violence with the evocative interior lives of Mahmood and Violet Volacki ... Mohamed brilliantly depicts the complexities of community within the Black diaspora ... After Mahmood’s arrest, the novel shifts its focus to the British criminal justice system, providing a visceral account of the protagonist’s carceral experience. We feel his eye twitching in response to the camera that takes his mug shot, as well as all the physical and psychic tolls of living in a cell as the clock ticks toward his execution, as his appeals for retrial are denied ... Mohamed manages such tender detail even while zooming out on the British prison and court systems more broadly.
... an extraordinary novel ... As a work of historical fiction, Mohamed’s novel is equally informative and moving. While the details of her story are drawn from news accounts and court records, the interior portraits stem from her own deeply sympathetic imagination. The resulting confluence of fact and fiction provides a damning indictment of judicial racism. But with a vision that exceeds this one tragic case, The Fortune Men also plumbs the existential plight of so many similar victims. The immediate allure of the novel is the vibrancy of Mohamed’s prose, her ability to capture the complicated culture of Cardiff and the sound of tortured optimism ... Hovering close to Mahmood’s thoughts, The Fortune Men conveys the mix of deprivation and harassment that exhausts unemployed laborers ... the crux of Mohamed’s artistry: Her clear-eyed acknowledgment of this man’s self-pity runs parallel to her piercing exposure of his society’s relentless, enervating prejudice ... The horrific finale of The Fortune Men is never in doubt, but for more than 200 pages Mohamed still creates a sharp sense of suspense by pulling us right into Mahmood’s world as his life tilts and then crashes.
It’s a grim, desperate and horribly familiar story, and The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed’s blistering novel about the case, could have been written in a bleak, sober style to match. The fact that it isn’t is something of a triumph on the part of the author ... The Fortune Men can be read as a comment on 21st-century Britain and its continued troubled legacy of empire, but also as a beautifully judged fiction in its own right — teeming with life, character and humour, and, particularly, evocative of place ... Mohamed...moves faultlessly from the cacophony of Butetown to describe the claustrophobia, camaraderies and hostilities of prison, where Mattan is now incarcerated and awaiting trial. Memory provides a rich landscape to counter the mundanity and anxiety of his days ... The Fortune Men is a novel on fire, a restitution of justice in prose.
In the language and detailed cataloging of the day, there is something of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News about Mohamed’s latest novel. The writing carries a depth of humanity that puts the reader right in the shoes of the characters — the clothes they wear, the streets they walk, the emotions they feel ... The Fortune Men is both complicated and uncomplicated in this way. It is filled with the hope of how things should be and the truth of how things are. All of it, the life of Mahmood Mattan, the system convicting him of this murder, and the community that allows it, all brought painfully into focus with Mohamed’s unflinching and gifted prose.
With the basic facts of the case and its outcome widely known, what is left for a novelist? How will she maintain suspense? Mohamed overcomes such doubts with the feast of her prose. She brings magic to her project, achieving in fiction what no historical account could match ... The Fortune Men revels in the sensual details of its life-and-death tale, from the starry Somali desert of Mahmood's youth to the smell of cooked food threading the air of Tiger Bay ... Believable, flawed, labile, proud, defiant, fatalistic and vengeful, Mahmood captures our full sympathy, and his final days are filled with insight and pathos. In a reversal of the western perspective, Mohamed shows us Britain through the eyes of this outsider, the Black African, the Muslim. It's an eye-opening angle of vision and an unforgettable one.
Mohamed’s refashioning of this story takes time to develop its momentum. Largely, this is because of an understandable attempt at even-handedness ... The novel becomes most powerfully compelling when attention is squarely focused on spiky, maverick Mattan and the fight to clear his name. Mattan is a shape-shifting character, variously positioned as a rakish antihero, plucky picaro, petty thief, charismatic dreamer, prideful gambler, doting father, anti-colonial firebrand and speaker of truth to power. It is predominately through her depiction of Mattan’s imprisonment that Mohamed achieves this layered complexity ... In her determined, nuanced and compassionate exposure of injustice, Mohamed gives the terrible story of Mattan’s life and death meaning and dignity.
A potent, pointed novel that nonetheless remains distant — it never quite finds an emotional tone ... My favorite parts of The Fortune Men are when the author sends Mahmood to the movies ... Reverberant passages are rare in The Fortune Men. The book dissipates a good deal of its energy, especially in its first half, pivoting between the stories of the shopkeeper, her family, Mahmood’s estranged wife and their sons, and that of Mahmood himself. There is more summary than scene ... Little momentum builds. When it threatens to do so, the story feels hemmed in by the details of Mahmood’s actual life. The novel is semidetached ... This is a hit-and-miss novel, but Mohamed is a big talent, and she’s only getting started.
[The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, and it’s not hard to see why: It’s a riveting tale in which Mohamed brings to life a 1950s port city and the injustice that occurred there ... The book moves back and forth from Mattan’s life to Violet Volacki’s family, showing the impact of her death on the community. Mohamed writes about both sides with empathy ... With the success of The Fortune Men, Mohamed is keeping Laura's husband's story alive.
The Fortune Men, which uses this real-life tragedy (Mattan was executed for the crime, for which he was exonerated in 1998) to create an intimate look at a man whose pride is seen as defiance and whose refusal to be demeaned proves dangerous to a Black man and a foreigner. Even though it takes place in 1950s Cardiff, it feels depressingly relevant today ... Often provocative and evocative but while Mohamed ultimately brings Mattan fully to life, the book’s digressions undermine some of its narrative urgency and potency. The result is a memorable portrait that sometimes gets lost in the novel’s sprawl ... Considering the suspense naturally built into the story, this should be a book that can’t be put down. Yet it is sometimes slow going, even if Mattan’s unsettled fate draws you along. Mohamed’s gradual development of Mattan’s character is poignant and profound, although it really gathers strength in the last third of the book when his increasingly dire situation pushes him to think more deeply about his life ... While Mohamed vividly draws the brawling and diverse tough-luck world of the Cardiff docks, most of the secondary characters feel thinly sketched ... The biggest distraction, however, is Mohamed’s parallel story depicting Violet Volacki, the woman killed, and her sister and niece. Thematically, the choice makes sense...but the story line lacks some of the oxygen that gives life to Mattan’s story. And after slowing the narrative down for much of the book, this subplot then just vanishes, without much in the way of resolution.
While it may appear that British fiction is now an encompassing, multicultural affair, Nadifa Mohamed’s novels challenge this idea. They portray physical and psychological landscapes that are largely absent from the canon of a country yet to come fully to terms with its colonial past ... What distinguishes The Fortune Men from...earlier works about immigrant experience is the level of (controlled) rage on display. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that, although seventy years separate the story and its telling, Mohamed’s descriptions of racist violence are still shamefully relevant ... Mohamed does not grant herself the leeway of creative circumvention, preferring to stay within the confines of the realist form, revealing the intractability of the system that betrayed Mattan, and his cognitive dissonance in the face of its injustice.
Mesmerizing ... The Fortune Men, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, manages an intimate presentation of Mattan’s experience by way of a present-tense, close third-person narration. Mohamed provides her reader with a nuanced, closely observed psychological portrait of a man who was guilty of many things, but not the crime for which he was sentenced to die ... Mohamed insists on his full humanity while also making clear the extent to which he was scapegoated by a racist and uncaring judicial system. Mohamed’s approach in this regard is canny ... In what is arguably the only misstep Mohamed makes, the sections involving Diana disappear in the second half of the book; there is a sense that this aspect of the story is not so much concluded as forgotten or abandoned ... Mohamed illustrates the doomed man’s faith in the British judicial system until well after it is merited: even close to the end, he believes his innocence will save him from the hangman’s noose. His naiveté is the central damning indictment of this searing, affecting and distressingly relevant novel.
Masterful ... A powerful evocation of one man’s life and a harrowing tale of racial injustice ... Mohamed brilliantly re-creates Tiger Bay’s bustling world of racetracks, milk bars and rooming houses, filled with diverse characters who range from the bigoted detectives to the sheikh from the local mosque ... A remarkable novel.
Riveting ... Combination murder mystery, courtroom drama and trenchant commentary on racism. The Fortune Men is a sweeping indictment of British jurisprudence and the many forms prejudice can take ... Most poignant of all is the portrait of Mahmood, a proud Muslim who retains his hope and humanity even in the face of the most brutal of injustices ... A memorable portrait.
Mahmood’s fate is never much in doubt (an epilogue brings the story up to date) but it’s an engrossing and tense story all the same. From Mahmood’s interior monologue to court transcripts to his conversations with Laura, the senses of loss and cruelty are palpable ... An intimate personal portrait with a broader message on the mistreatment of migrants.
